Phoenix Continues To Collect Samples

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Scraping action produced piles of scrapings at the bottom of atrench on Monday, but did not get the material into its scoop,information returned from Mars on Monday night confirmed. The pilesof scrapings produced were smaller than previous piles dug byPhoenix, which made it difficult to collect the material into theRobotic Arm scoop.
"It's like trying to pick up dust with a dustpan, but withouta broom," said Richard Volpe, an engineer from NASA's JetPropulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., on Phoenix's Robotic Armteam.
Images from the lander's Robotic Arm Camera showed that the scoopremained empty after two sets of 50 scrapes performed earlierMonday were collected into two piles in the trench informally named"Snow White." These activities were a test of possibletechniques for collecting a sample of ice or ice-rich soil foranalysis.
The mission teams are now focusing on use of the motorized raspwithin the Robotic Arm scoop to access the hard icy soil and icedeposits. They are conducting tests on Phoenix's engineering modelin the Payload Interoperability Testbed in Tucson to determine theoptimum ways to rasp the hard surfaces and acquire the particulatematerial produced during the rasping. The testbed work and tests onMars will help the team determine the best way to collect a sampleof Martian ice for delivery to TEGA.
The Phoenix mission is led by Peter Smith of the University ofArizona with project management at JPL and development partnershipat Lockheed Martin, Denver. International contributions come fromthe Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel,Switzerland; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark;Max Planck Institute, Germany; and the Finnish MeteorologicalInstitute.